Why You Should Avoid Using Puppeteer for Web Scraping (Unless Absolutely Necessary)

Setting up and using Puppeteer for web scraping can be an unnecessarily complex process that should only be considered as a last resort. The setup process alone can take hours, and the ongoing maintenance and performance considerations make it far less efficient than alternative methods in most cases.

The Challenges of Implementing Puppeteer

Puppeteer presents several significant challenges that make it a suboptimal choice for most web scraping projects:

• Complex configuration requirements
• Version compatibility issues between Puppeteer Core and Chromium
• Difficult deployment on serverless platforms
• Performance limitations with significantly longer execution times
• Extensive memory requirements

Setting Up Puppeteer on AWS Lambda

If you must use Puppeteer, here’s how to configure it with AWS Lambda:

1. Install the necessary packages: Spartacus Chromium, Puppeteer Core, and ensure version compatibility between them
2. Configure environment variables for credentials
3. Set up different browser launch configurations for local testing versus Lambda execution
4. Increase Lambda function memory allocation to at least 2000MB
5. Extend timeout settings to accommodate Puppeteer’s slower execution time
6. Use S3 for deployment as the package will be too large for direct Lambda uploads

Best Practices When Using Puppeteer

If you absolutely must use Puppeteer, consider these recommendations:

• Extract the entire HTML content and parse it with Cheerio afterward rather than doing complex DOM manipulation within Puppeteer
• Use the x86_64 architecture for Lambda functions, not ARM64
• Implement proper browser and page closing to avoid memory leaks
• Consider using proxy configuration for better reliability
• Implement appropriate error handling as browser initialization can fail

When Puppeteer Might Be Necessary

Despite its drawbacks, Puppeteer does have legitimate use cases:

• Extracting content from PDFs
• Scraping TikTok videos or other highly dynamic content
• Websites that require complex JavaScript execution
• Scenarios where you need to generate screenshots or PDFs

Performance Considerations

Performance testing reveals that Puppeteer-based solutions can take 8+ seconds for initial execution compared to milliseconds for standard HTTP requests. Even with warm starts, Puppeteer remains significantly slower than alternatives.

The complexity of deployment, configuration challenges, and performance limitations make Puppeteer a tool that should only be used when other methods have been exhausted. For most web scraping needs, simpler and more efficient approaches should be your first choice.